Twitter joins Facebook and Pinterest in e-commerce drive

Twitter has tweaked its e-coomerce propositionto keep pace with online rivals such as Facebook and Pinterest.

In a bid to add more functionalist to its users and dollars on its bottom line Twitter,long promoted as a way to see what's happening in the world, is testing new ways of getting consumer insights and expanding it online purchasing offer.

The company has shown a new way to highlight products and places on its site, bringing relevant tweets to the fore while also providing a way to purchase items.

In an example, it showed a page it built for the book "The Martian," complete with related images, tweets, and a button that says Buy on Twitter. The new pages will be promoted through people's Twitter feeds.

As well as Twitter building these pages, celebrities and brands will be able to build them too. It offered examples of pages built by Demi Lovato, Reese Witherspoon, Nike and giant retailer Target, the last of which is filled with tweets promoting summer clothing, for example.

In earlier tests, tweets from brands might include a buy button, but they appeared in the regular Twitter stream and not pulled out on separate pages.

It's the latest move by Twitter's part to attract more users. They also show a stronger play by Twitter to compete against rivals like Facebook and Pinterest, which have also started to let users buy products.

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Twitter said it had more than 40 partner curators, who also include musician Amanda Palmer and YouTube personality Michelle Phan.

The features arrive amidst other new efforts by Twitter to expand its service and grow its users. On Thursday, Twitter's Project Lightning was revealed -- an upcoming feature to better surface content around live events.